


The Buffy Complex

by ScottPaulson



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, people being sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 11:10:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10535250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScottPaulson/pseuds/ScottPaulson
Summary: When Buffy walks into a room the air changes, moves differently, and there’s a thing in the bottom of her stomach that pulls, and contracts, and pulses whenever she’s around. Maybe it’s a slayer thing. Maybe it’s just Buffy’s natural charisma. Maybe it’s the stab wound.Faith calls it her Buffy Complex. Quietly in her head, where nobody else can hear how stupid that sounds.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While not the first thing I've written, this is the first thing I haven't immediately despised and deleted. Criticism is welcome, but may cause me to drink heavily and internalise my feelings.

Tonight is a bad night. She’s far too drunk, the club is way too loud, and people are annoying. Usually Faith’s crazy for this kind of shit. Or at least, she’s pretty sure she is. Lately it’s been getting harder and harder to tell.

“So I’m thinking I should buy you a drink,” says a voice from beside her at the bar. Faith turns slowly, so as not to fall off her chair, to find _Some Guy_ staring back at her expectantly. He’s tall, dark and handsome-ish if she squints hard enough to bring him into focus. He also looks like he’s probably been talking at her for a while.

Shit.

“Look man,” she starts, before catching a glimpse of how empty her drink is. “Sure, maybe you should.” Some Guy’s eyes light up and she groans internally at how much she’s probably gonna have to break his fingers later. He goes back to the conversation that he was presumably having with her before she realised he was there, and she goes back to not caring.

Tonight is a bad night. Which is a shame, because it had started out so well. She’d had a pretty minimal hangover, she managed to not burn the bacon for once, and approximately zero people had tried to talk to her all day. Then, after a leisurely stroll through the local cemetery, she’d dusted a half dozen vamps and hit one of them with some totally sweet seasonal smack talk.

_Fangsgiving_ , she snorts to herself.

“Oh you think think that’s funny do you?” says Some Guy, grinning to himself like he’s just hit a home run. _Ugh_.

After the glow of having delivered some verbal smackdown had left however, Faith had remembered that her next stop was home. Home with the people, and the judging, and the teenagers, and suddenly she’d never wanted to be anywhere less.

Naturally she’s ended up here, in the skeeviest nightclub Cleveland has to offer.

“Hey, are you even listening to me?” whines Some Guy. She’s really not. She takes another swig of her drink and looks him up and down. He’s an above average looking guy, his hair’s slicked back and his beard is short and well trimmed and _fuck_ if he doesn’t look like he’s never thrown a punch in his life. He looks like he prepared for this, this charade of social interaction, this--

She stops thinking and takes another look at the dregs of her latest bourbon and realises that she doesn’t know how many she’s had. Whiskey makes her sentimental. And fuzzy.

“Guess not,” she says into her glass. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Oh that’s how it is? Look bitch, you don’t get to just--”

“Pretty sure she’s done talking to you,” says a different voice, and she knows who it is without turning around, knew before she’d even said a word. When Buffy walks into a room the air changes, moves differently, and there’s a thing in the bottom of her stomach that pulls, and contracts, and pulses whenever she’s around. Maybe it’s a slayer thing. Maybe it’s just Buffy’s natural charisma. Maybe it’s the stab wound.

Faith calls it her Buffy Complex. Quietly in her head, where nobody else can hear how stupid that sounds.

There’s a scuffle behind her. Some Guy presumably called Buffy a bitch as well. She feels sorry for him a little bit, but not enough that she doesn’t take the opportunity to finish her drink.

She’s staring at the empty glass again 30 seconds later when Buffy pulls up a stool next to her.

“You drink too much.”

“Yup.”

“It’s nice, you know, when you report back and let us know that you’ve not died or anything.”

Shit. Buffy’s tone is tight and Faith’s not drunk enough to not notice the signs. Pissed Buffy leads to Petulant Buffy and then, more often than not, Disappointed Buffy. None of those do much for Faith’s sunny disposition, but the last one sends shooting pains through her Buffy Complex that really lend weight to the whole ‘stab wound’ theory.

_Buffy Complex_ , she snorts again. She really needs a better name than that.

“Are you laughing at me? Because honestly? It’s not funny.”

“No it’s not-- I mean it is but I’m not--”

“Faith, you can’t just disappear OK? When we agreed to do this, we said there was going to be communication. You know what that means right? It means communicating.”

“Jesus Buffy, I’m not 5.”

“Pretty sure 5 year old's know how to operate a phone nowadays.”

_That’s not even the point_ , she thinks to herself before realising that she meant to say it out loud. She turns to look at Buffy for the first time since she arrived because fuck it, if they’re going to fight they might as well do it properly. Buffy’s sat ramrod straight, staring at the bottles behind the bar as if she’s trying to make them explode through sheer force of will. And really, if anyone could it’d be her.

This is different somehow. If this was Pissed Buffy she’d have lashed out already. Faith would be nursing a black eye and watching the back of Buffy’s head as she stalked away. This looks more like when Willow doesn’t sleep because she’s so deep in some scholarly text that she forgets she’s a human being, or when Xander looks at old photographs and can’t quite seem to crack a smile like he used to. This is Concerned Buffy.

Not that she wanted to fight in the first place, but suddenly she’s not sure if she even could.

“Look B, I just needed to get away for a bit, OK?”

“Why?” Buffy asks, except it’s not accusing like it usually is, just curious. Maybe it’s always been like that and it just takes this much booze for her to be able to understand basic human interaction.

_Because it’s quiet here_ , she thinks. Because in this bar, with these people, she’s not a Slayer. She’s not a hero. or a villain, or a role model, or a cautionary tale. She’s just Faith. And that’s not fine, not by a long shot, because she doesn’t really like being Faith either. But at least when she’s just Faith nobody’s watching, nobody can see the cracks in her humanity, all the ways she tries to be a real person and just _isn’t_.

“You’re all so fucking uptight,” she says instead, with what she hopes is a smirk. Buffy rolls her eyes and moves to stand up.

“Well I guess you’re way too cool for me,” she says, somehow still every bit the sassy cheerleader she’s been since she was 15. “You plan on being home like, ever?”

“Eh,” she says with a shrug. “I’ll make an appearance.”

Buffy deflates a little at that, and suddenly she’s Concerned Buffy again. The difference is so slight that she almost misses it, which makes her think that maybe she’s always been concerned. Maybe Faith’s always just been too emotionally dense to notice.

“I just... I worry, you know?” Buffy says quietly, and there’s movement in her stomach. It’s either the booze or the Buffy Complex doing backflips, but she’s pretty sure she’ll vomit if it goes on for much longer.

“Thanks,” she chokes out before turning back to the bar, praying that it puts an end to it. There’s a couple of seconds before then the air thins again, and Buffy’s gone.

_Tonight was a bad night_ , she thinks about a half hour later, once her fight or flight response stops buzzing in her brain and everything goes back to just about as still as it can be when she’s this drunk. That was an olive branch. That was a chance to say... well, anything. Something that wasn’t the same bullshit back and forth they always have, something actually meaningful.

_You’re a fucking moron_ , says the Buffy Complex, and Faith can’t help but agree. And for a brief moment, she considers running back to the house to find her, to find anyone, and tell them everything. To yell at the top of her lungs that this isn’t what she wants. That she doesn’t want to be drunk in this shitty club any more, that she wants to be a fucking human being and she wants to live, and love, and --

"You’re a fucking moron," she says to herself, and orders another drink instead.


End file.
